6.13.2019

Reasons I Find It Hard To Wake Up

You should see the Chinatown I dreamed last night.
Rooftop dumpling and noodle cafe, looking over a courtyard bustling with humans and leafy shade trees, surrounded by crumbling brick buildings, held together by ancient layers of multicoloured, peeling paint in graphic shapes. Windows filmy with time and steam, tall windows framed by brick arches and packed with hanging plants, drummers practicing inside.  At street level grocery stores with avocados and yams as big as your head and tea counters full of all the artists, talking, crying, laughing, their exquisite shoes in various states of disrepair, and having to ask them to move to get to the precarious stacks of giant produce, everyone laughing boisterously when a pile rolled onto the creaky old wood floor.  Friends’ apartments in odd shapes at the peaks of buildings, with window seats and skinny steep stairs down from sitting rooms to kitchens to bedrooms.  Soft pinks and lacy curtains.  And kissing old friends met on cobblestone, music in their eyes and mouths, as we laughed about how hard it was to come down from trips to Calgary.  I wondered in my dream how I hadn’t known this Chinatown existed, after all my years of living here, and how I could live in one of those falling down places, draped in silk, home with my tribe.

No comments: